1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of disk drives and, in particular, to an event management technique using time information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a typical hard disk drive has a built-in function to detect an error as one of the events occurring in a read/write operation, etc., and record the error information.
In general, in the disk drive, error log information (error log file) including various kinds of error information is stored in a system area on a disk medium serving as a recording medium. The system area comprises, for example, a recording area corresponding to a few tracks on the outermost peripheral side on the disk medium and is distinguished from a recording area of normal user data.
Further, in a conventional disk drive, a so-called turned-ON time from a power ON time to a power OFF time is measured and additively integrated to allow a resultant integrated time to be recorded on the recording medium. At an error occurring time, not only error information indicating an error content but also the turned-ON time is recorded as time stamp information.
A host system (a personal computer, etc.) can recognize the error content by reading the error information and turned-ON time from the disk drive, as required.
However, the host system can recognize an error occurring timing only by the use of a relative time which is a turned-ON time of the disk drive. In other words, the host system cannot recognize, in association with an internal time (time of day, date and year) of the system, the occurrence of an event such as an error occurring in the disk drive.